What does good policing look like? At first blush, that question may conjure up images of uniformed officers chatting with local residents, playing with laughing children while on patrol, or attending community meetings. But now consider the question in different contexts. What does good policing look like when an officer has to respond to a minor fender bender? Or notify a parent of a child’s lethal drug overdose? Or interview a suspected serial rapist? Or approach a person who is acting erratically? Or enforce an outstanding arrest warrant against someone who angrily insists that the officer is harassing him? As these scenarios suggest, there is no single answer: good policing depends on the situation.
How, then, can we best ensure that officers engage in good policing, given the wide variety of tasks they must perform? Activists, politicians, and officers themselves have called for more education—training in de-escalation techniques, cultural awareness, and implicit biases—and better equipment, including body-worn cameras and less-lethal weaponry, such as Tasers, as well as change in agency policies and procedures and reform for a host of legal structures that regulate the police. But while those changes can marginally improve policing practices and public perceptions of the profession and may be necessary components of meaningful, long-term reform, they will not be sufficient to accomplish lasting change on their own.
In this Article, I contend that a more fundamental reform is necessary: the core principles of policing need to be adjusted to change how officers view their job and their relationship with the community. Law enforcement has long taken great pride in its adherence to a Warrior ethos, which emphasizes honor, duty, resolve, and a willingness to engage in righteous violence. Warrior rhetoric has infused modern policing, shaping how officers perceive their role and informing the way they approach and interact with the public. It has promoted a self-image of officers as soldiers on the front lines in the never-ending battle to preserve order and civilization against the forces of chaos and criminality, and it is believed to both ensure effective law enforcement and increase safety. In too many communities, however, the principles that have grown out of Warrior policing have proven counterproductive, contributing to a distrustful, adversarial, and sometimes aggressive approach to policing that has undermined good police-community relations and exposed officers and civilians alike to unnecessary risk. Today, law enforcement is reaping what the Warrior culture has sown. Policing in the United States is in crisis. Public confidence in policing is at its lowest point since 1993, when four Los Angeles Police Department (“LAPD”) officers were prosecuted in federal court, after a state court acquittal, for the beating of Rodney King. Twenty-three years later, a bare majority of Americans report confidence in the police, and an unprecedented number of people report no or very little confidence in policing.
